Anaheim shootings, protests: Anger, politics, power

ANAHEIM – This was the Anaheim that the world saw in recent weeks: Protesters streaming by the hundreds down city streets. Police officers dressed in black-padded body armor wielding batons and beanbag shotguns. Store windows shattered. Dumpsters on fire.
The protests laid bare years of growing resentment and deep division in a city best known as the home of the Happiest Place on Earth. They tapped into anger over politics and power, over crime and police – over the very direction of Orange County’s biggest city.

Interviews with protesters, political leaders, police and residents of Anaheim show that the recent unrest was never just about the police shootings that first sent people into the streets. The groundwork had been laid for Anaheim to explode.
The shootings just lit the fuse.

POLITICS AND POWER
Manuel Diaz bolted when he saw police on the afternoon of July 21, racing down an alleyway and across the front yard of a threadbare apartment complex. What happened next brought television news vans and outside protesters to a part of the city that has seldom seen the spotlight.
Police shot and killed Diaz in the home neighborhood of a gang they describe as one of the city’s oldest and most violent. Diaz’s death was the first of two back-to-back police shootings last month that helped set off nights of protest.